October 17, 1993

Raised by the Aborigines

By SUZANNE BERNE

REMEMBERING BABYLON
By David Malouf.

erhaps an exile's greatest fear is that by losing the world that has shaped him, he will somehow cease to be himself. Even
for the voluntary exile -- the pioneer or the immigrant -- everything that once seemed fixed is uprooted; everything known becomes strange. Most unsettling of all is the future, which an exile cannot predict, having left
history behind.

In his breathtaking seventh novel, "Remembering Babylon," which is among the finalists for this year's Booker Prize in England, David Malouf examines the fragility of identity from within a band of 19th-century British colonials, who have
scratched out a home in the Australian bush. Like the Old Testament's captive Israelites in Babylon, these settlers feel both vulnerable and disoriented. Their community is almost completely isolated, "at the
end of the line," in a blazing, rough country of too much space and "illimitable night." For spiritual guidance, they have only an abstracted minister; for education, a resentful imported teen-age schoolmaster.

Then one day, like Ezekiel among the Israelites, they are visited by a prophetic vision -- but where Ezekiel's fiery whirlwind of wings and faces turns out to be cherubim pulling the throne of God, what arrives among the
settlers is a "black white man." His name is Gemmy Fairley and his initial appearance is both angelic and demonic. To the three children who see him first, he looms up from a swamp "in a shape more like a
watery, heat-struck mirage than a thing of substance, elongated and airily indistinct . . . bowling, leaping, flying."

The settlers reconstruct Gemmy's background from the few English words he can remember; he has lived with a tribe of aborigines for 16 years, since they discovered him as a child, cast ashore on a beach (they, too, originally
mistook him for a spirit). As a result of this accidental exile, he develops into something mysterious and threatening, a "mixture of monstrous strangeness and unwelcome likeness," neither European nor aborigine,
but a bewildered, gaping, grinning scarecrow, inept and timid, "a parody of a white man." Gemmy himself can no longer define what he is, recognizing only that he shares his dreams with another creature, one who
"came right up to the surface of him" when he met the settlers.

Ironically, Gemmy first identifies himself as a "B-b-british object," a phrase that swims out of his murky past. He is an object indeed, first of the colonists' amazement, then their amusement, which turns rapidly
into disquiet and suspicion and soon into frightened hostility. What he represents, of course, is a cruel exaggeration of themselves, an "imitation gone wrong" whose very existence calls their hardscrabble enterprise
into question. Will their immersion in this savage place dissolve their identities as well? "Could you lose it?" they ask themselves, eyeing Gemmy. "Not just language but it." They don't even have
a word for what they fear losing, since "it" is the core of themselves, the definitive human spirit, the only boundary between them and the "impenetrably dark" surrounding bush.

Yet for the most resourceful settlers, Gemmy provides a revelation. The minister sees him as "a true child of the place as it will one day be," a crude forerunner of the ideal colonial, who is willing to change to
fit his environment rather than trying to alter this "part of the world's garden" to suit himself. To the schoolmaster, Gemmy is transformed into a figure of grandeur, a reminder of the "mere naked endurance
perhaps that best revealed the qualities of men." The family that shelters him discovers a deeper comprehension of one another. For nearly everyone else, he is a dangerous abomination.

Gradually, Gemmy becomes as multifaceted as Ezekiel's cloud of cherubim -- at turns human, at turns brutal, depending on who searches his face and why. Mr. Malouf, an Australian writer whose previous novel was "The
Great World," adroitly limns each of these shifting projections, sympathetically portraying the desperation of human exile with its terrors, its possibilities, its unlikely opportunities for grace. To read this remarkable
book is to remember Babylon well, whether you think you've been there or not.

Suzanne Berne teaches writing at Harvard University.

'I AM A BRITISH
OBJECT'

The Australian author David Malouf recalled that in writing "Remembering Babylon," "the most difficult part was getting what I wanted without being pretentious or pretending to know something I don't. No
white person here understands the aboriginal world enough to write about it."

Mr. Malouf said that anthropologists, journalists and others all have been misled by aborigines in the past, partly because the aborigines found whites "extremely gullible," but mostly because they believed they could
"preserve their culture only by keeping much of it secret." In his novel, he filters his depiction of indigenous culture through Gemmy, the "wild child."

The author, who was born in Brisbane in 1934 and graduated from the University of Queensland, has written five books of poetry, seven previous novels, a memoir and three opera librettos. "One of my concerns is the place
of language, not just as a means of communication," he said, "but as a way of apprehending and organizing our world."

Mr. Malouf's character Gemmy Fairley, a white urchin raised in the Australian bush, is inspired by a historical figure, Gemmy Morril, who had a different background but who walked out of the bush in the 1840's and
presented himself to astonished colonists, saying, "I am a British object."

"In that amusing mistake of object for subject," Mr. Malouf said, "he was speaking a truth he didn't quite understand.

"In fact," he continued, the settlers "didn't recognize aboriginal civilization as civilization." The nascent Australians of "Remembering Babylon" were "a community that wouldn't
otherwise have held together but for their whiteness and Europeanness, which Gemmy, by his very experience, is challenging. Poor and powerless, they were grasping whiteness and Europeanness and holding on to that."